I am currently backing up my Suse 9.0 box with Arcserve/Brightstor for Linux to a 110 DLT drive.

I have had success backing up and restoring folders, home directories, ect.

But what about a full system restore on a production server? Can anyone share thier experiences on that (regardless of what backup software you use)?

I want to come up with a solid backup strategy for a production server running basic services (vsftpd, smb, etc), but am not exactly sure how that works in Linux.

thanks in advance...

The simplest method is to back up /dev/hda (gzipped preferably) to something. If the server ever gets corrupted then restoring to /dev/hda will restore everything (including partition tables, MBR, etc.) to its proper place. The two downsides are that it will probably be a fairly big backup (even gzipped) and it is hard to partially restore (single file/directory etc.). Apart from this it should give a simple way of backing up everything. This is probably best complimented by smaller backups of those files which have changed or are likely to have changed as it won't really be something that can be performed on a daily basis.

any other suggestions

anyone?